“Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld
America continues to sink into a black pit of despair, seemingly way beyond its event horizon. Chris Hedges refers to our future as one of sacrifice zones; those areas on this planet where the dead are simply consequences of a corporation’s cost-benefit analysis. Few remain who willingly make the superhuman efforts required to protect the living world and her children. But they are out there. They remain.
Chris Hedges is
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
one of the last to stand up to the corporate power that has taken America by the throat and strangled her until her purse spills to the ground. He is America’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He is one of the last to stand while those with eyes to see turned their heads to avoid what their eyes were seeing.
“It’s absolutely imperative that we begin to understand what unfettered, unregulated capitalism does,” Hedges emphasized. “These are sacrifice zones, areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. And we’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed. And because there are no impediments left, these sacrifice zones are just going to spread outward.”
The whole world has become a sacrifice zone. The shopping mall, main street, the Middle East, Africa and South America, the ground our families walk upon, even our families, are all sacrificed by idiots whose only sense of value is in self-indulgence. Hedges openly defies corporate power. He openly defies imperialism. Hedges stood up to Obama, suing him for claiming the right to take the sons and daughters of this world for any reason whatsoever.
English: Hugo Chávez (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Hugo Chavez, another of those normal human beings with normal human faults, took his power and turned his corner of the world into a better place. The corporate empire mocked him for his sensitivity towards the poor and towards the human spirit. In the end, his last words were that he did not want to die:
The sanctification of Venezuela’s charismatic leader Hugo Chavez continued in earnest on Tuesday as his last words were revealed to be “Please don’t let me die” – an entreaty uttered because, the government said, he so desperately wanted to continue serving the Venezuelan people.
It might or might not have been murder, but rest assured we know who benefits. In our cancerous society only thugs make it out with dignity. But this man did what he could to make life worth living for those who followed him. He was vilified because he would not turn his country into a sacrifice zone. It’s too soon to say what the future will hold. But for his effort the lives of millions reflect the choice he provided for economic and social justice. He lives on in each of them, because he sacrificed himself.
Thanks to Laura Knight-Jadczyk, one of the last to stand up for unvarnished truth in a time of total deceit, history begins to reveal herself to us. Despite years of organized mud-slinging she churns out the true nature of our past, our present, and what it portends for our future.
In spite of the pathological persistence of her defamers, and in fact because of it, she uncovered the psychological and sociological science of Ponerology. She brought to light the darkest secret of empire and social decay, discovered under the horrors of Nazi and Communist rule. She brought it from the edge of the abyss, reaching out to its pioneer the late Lobaczewski, himself marginalized by pathological networks. Following the tracks led her to uncover the role of cosmic catastrophes in shoving humanity’s collective face into the mud, where the pathological simply had to place his boot over our collective face. Because of her extensive suffering and life-long work she reveals the true labors of liberation.
“An anthropocentric worldview where man believes he is in control stops people – even people in power – from being aware of the realities of our existence on this planet which include civilization destroying cosmic events.”
My mind drifts from these extraordinary figures to the people they stand up and speak out for. I’m speaking of a girl I saw standing outside the other day, her mother leaving her outside in the cold to drive off to another party, her father nowhere in sight and for good reason. This girl was young and you’ve seen her brown hair before, her yellow raincoat a hand-me-down so big she swims in it. You’ve seen her sad, crying eyes before.
As I opened the door I heard her wailing for someone in this god-forsaken universe to care for her, for her mother to come back for her. I suddenly understood that, in these spreading sacrifice zones, few speak her language any more. She is mute. She does not exist to them. So even if they heard they would not understand. There is no computer program on this planet that can translate for our society what it means to be a girl in a sacrifice zone, her mother leaving her behind to enjoy hours of intoxication and the avoidance of reality. With a heavy heart we found her shelter, and we found her siblings. But though I can still hear her crying, I also still remember the glimmer of hope in her eyes when she saw her sisters again. Long live the king.
And her counterpart, the young boy who turned his pop-tart into a mountain, only to face a school lock-down because someone thought he shaped it into a gun. The boy whose only crime was to, in his childish way, emulate the pathological culture of violence he was born into, one which turned around to throttle him for doing so. And his reply? That he is still hungry. Young man, so are we.
I am not afraid of a heavy heart. I am not afraid of the pain of seeing the darkness that has been unleashed on this planet. Because the more that we see, the more active we become, the more that the light finds a crack through which to shine. I am only afraid that I will not be as active as I could have been. That there is a stone that remains unturned.
At the end of this collective folly we call history it seems we can only react to the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” thrown down from on high. The psychopath has the higher ground, and we are trapped through law, morals, and customs that require obedience and meekness in the face of evil. But the psychopath does not have the highest ground. The universe has the final say, and it is loud and furious in its condemnation of human strife and ignorance. The cosmos provides the battle cry for her children, and ultimately engulfs them:
when volcanoes erupt or comets blaze across the sky or meteor storms and weather anomalies increase, the illusion collapses, the raison d’être of the elites (i.e. protecting the people) collapses and the target has always and will ever be, ultimately, the ruling classes.
America sinks into a pit of despair, seemingly far beyond its event horizon. The fever reaches its climax. So it’s with a heavy heart that I rejoice in knowing that no empire lasts forever. I rejoice with a heavy heart because a few still remain. That knowledge, that light, can never die. Long live the king, the spirit, the essence that blesses the defenders of her kingdom which knows no limits, which conquers every fear. May she rise again from her grave in whatever form he, or she, chooses.
“Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld
The Koonie Boonies 